The Holderliniae

The thirty hymns of The Hölderliniae are inspired by the intricacies and transcendent humanity of Beethoven's last quartets. Nathaniel Tarn's new book opens with a biographical note on the "Poet of Poets," Friedrich Hölderlin, setting the scene and introducing the doomed love of the poet's life, Diotima; it ends in the Neckar River, the river of Hölderlin's birth and death. Through affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through Hölderlin, and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn. The French Revolution-which Hölderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror-illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall those past tragedies. Line after line carries Hölderlin's hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind's disciplines and make a universe of its own.